Before + After: A Transitional Kitchen Remodel
The clients who interest me most aren't the ones starting from scratch. They're the ones who have a home with real potential and a clear sense of how they want to live in it, they just need someone to figure out how to get there without blowing the whole budget to do it.
This project was that. A young couple, serious entertainers, mid-century sensibility, a house that had good bones under a dated and compartmentalized layout. They didn't need a teardown. They needed someone to figure out what to keep, what to change, and how to make it feel like them.
The kitchen: one wall changes everything
The original kitchen was closed off from the dining room; functional in isolation, but wrong for how they lived. They cook together. They have people over constantly. The separation between kitchen and dining room meant the person cooking was always missing the conversation.
Opening the wall between the two spaces and creating a pass-through and serving area was the move that changed everything else. Once that was decided, the rest of the kitchen followed logically.
We reimagined the cabinetry layout while keeping as much of the existing material as we could repurpose. The tile floors stayed, they had genuine character and kept the budget where it needed to be. The range stayed too. Most of the cabinetry stayed too, for budget reasons. Not every decision requires replacement, and keeping what's working is part of what makes a thoughtful renovation different from an impulsive one.
What changed: painted cabinetry in a soft slate blue and crisp white, brass hardware, open shelving that lets their things actually be seen, globe pendant lights that hit the mid-century note they were after, and a vintage Turkish runner underfoot that adds warmth without trying too hard.
The result is a kitchen that functions the way their life does; open, connected, ready for people.
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BEFORE
Personality in the Details
The woman of the house has a genuine love of bunnies, not as a theme, but as a real thing that matters to her. So rather than relegating it to a tchotchke on a shelf, we leaned into it: Hunt Slonem's Lee Jofa wallpaper in the dining space, which creates an unexpected, joyful contrast to the kitchen's more structured palette.
This is the kind of decision that makes a home feel personal rather than assembled. When something specific to the people who live there gets treated as a real design element instead of an afterthought, the whole room changes register.
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Beyond the Kitchen
The scope here was larger than just the kitchen. They also wanted a proper primary suite; which the original floor plan didn't really have, with his-and-hers walk-in closets and a connection to the backyard that didn't exist before. We reconfigured the back of the house to make that work: new doors opening to a pool area, wood flooring replacing dated carpet, a bathroom redesigned from a former bedroom.
Each of these decisions was made with the same logic as the kitchen; what can we keep, what needs to change, and how do we make it cohesive rather than piecemeal. The result is a house that reads as a whole rather than a collection of separate renovation decisions made at different times.
AFTER- DOORS TO THE POOL, CLOSETS RECONFIGURED
BEFORE - NO DOOR TO THE BACKYARD
AFTER
BEFORE- bedroom turned into bathroom
Before these rooms were functional but disconnected, from each other and from the people living in them. Now they're not. That's what a renovation should do, and it doesn't require starting over to get there.
AFTER
BEFORE
If you're working with a home that has good bones and a layout that isn't quite working, I'd love to hear about it.
